Pedalboards

Personal weekend project – rebuilding & re-wiring this board, which I use for home recording (it’s about 40 pounds, too heavy to travel much of anywhere). You can see the previous version here, being used during the Rosetta/Utopioid sessions for clean sounds and overdubs.

Before, it only had the one 8-outlet BBE supply plus a 1Spot and a daisy chain. Combined with the necessarily long cable runs, it was pretty noisy. Analog delay + phaser + flanger + chorus, multiple digital pedals, an opto trem, and a PNP fuzz with an inverter chip in it. That’s as close to a worst-case scenario for noise as I can imagine: three analog BBD clocks, five analog LFOs, DC-DC conversion, and three ADC-DACs. In the previous arrangement, it made heterodyning noises like a four-alarm fire and ticked like a grandfather clock, combined with all sorts of weird chirps and pops and a lot of background hiss.

That’s pretty much all gone now that everything is isolated (the tuner and the input buffer share a node but that’s trivial because they’re so close to each other and the tuner is off while it passes signal). No fancy cables or anything, just careful layout and separate grounds for all the noisy stuff. It helps that the patch cable runs are shorter and more optimized – the previous layout was bad because the board was set up with access as the main priority, i.e. according the fantasy that it would be used while playing live. This layout assumes that the board will be treated like a synth-style control surface, dialing in ‘patches’ and then recording those sounds one at a time, with no need for tap-dancing. It’s just a different way to approach the pedalboard as a system – a ‘console,’ rather than an ‘instrument.’

Here is my updated pedalboard (it’s a mess like me)